Mike Silva - Place to Be

February 17 – March 25, 2017

During his recovery from a serious illness last year Mike Silva started to make two series of paintings, separate but connected by the artist as the central player. Following his brush with mortality he began to look through old photographs of his lovers, which became the subjects for portraits. He also started to make paintings of his immediate surroundings, banal interiors, paintings almost of nothing in particular. Nothing in particular to us, the viewer but very particular to the artist. These are paintings of his bathroom, his kitchen table, his coffee pot, his studio window. Or, more particularly, the light hitting his coffee pot, or filtering through his t-shirt, hung to dry in front of his studio window. These are quietly celebratory paintings. Paintings of love, light, time, memory, place. I have loved these men. I am here. The light coming through my bathroom window is beautiful today. I am alive. Like a contemporary Hammershøi enjoying dust motes floating in the sunlight.